Considering a new hosting solution? Cloud web hosting services are becoming the standard for hosting websites and web applications. Cloud hosting provides scalability, cost, processing, and distribution efficiencies. Current hosting providers are all jumping on board and we can expect to see competition for the market continue to increase.
Advanced Pricing Comparison Tool
Ideas International has released a tool 12/5/2011 to help with competitive pricing of cloud solutions. This allows one to perform a direct comparison of providers side by side in a great format. It makes the decsion making process incredibly easy.
Reviews of Providers:
Gartner's Magic Quandrant Review (They no longer allow free access)
Sitepoint's Review
T10Media Review
Factors for rank:
- Performance
- Size of network
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)- Assurance of proper system resource allocation with a distributed environment.
Providers:
- RackSpace Cloud
- Only 1 data center used for Cloud Services - Dallas TX, USA
- Cloud Servers Do not have Cpanel Interface in place for control of the cloud environment
- SLA http://www.rackspacecloud.com/legal/sla
- further detailed review
- Amazon Web Services
- GoGrid
- RightScale - Amazon Reseller designed for large online applications
- Etelos
- 3tera
- Hosting.com
- NTT Communications
- Cloud.bg - located in Bulgaria
- VPS Net
- Relia Cloud
- NetDepot
- Monitoring- Cloudkick
Drupal based cloud services
It is possible to utilize any of the below listed services for Drupal based cloud hosting. A leading provider of Drupal based services, from the founder of Drupal, would be Acquia hosting. The service can be expensive.
For those with server administration expertise that are looking for a more affordable solution, look to the below providers. We currently utilize Rackspace's Cloud offering. The downside to this is the need for configuration, maintenance, and administration. A free alternative for Drupal based cloud hosting is Drupal Gardens. It utilizes Acquia's enterprise level hosting architecture.
For those with server administration expertise that are looking for a more affordable solution, look to the below providers. We currently utilize Rackspace's Cloud offering. The downside to this is the need for configuration, maintenance, and administration. A free alternative for Drupal based cloud hosting is Drupal Gardens. It utilizes Acquia's enterprise level hosting architecture.
Sources:
Further detail on cloud hosting http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.com/web-hosting-knowledge/a-brief-on-cloud-hosting/
Cloud providers Review:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/terremark/168687.html (They no longer allow free access)
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/08/cloud-hosting-solutions/
http://www.cloudhostingmag.com/2010/02/cloud-hosting-providers/
http://www.cloud-hosting-providers.com/reviews/cloud-bg-cloud-hosting-reviews/ - Issue with this ranking - new services are getting high rankings that may not deserve due to a low number of reviews.
A comparison of Amazon Web Services and RackSpace: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/compare
Amazon Cloud vs. Traditional hosting via GoDaddy:
http://thomas.broxrost.com/2009/03/12/why-amazon-web-services-just-became-a-competitive-web-hosting-provider/
A good platform for consumers and provider.
I recently visited the above mentioned webhostingsecretrevealed.com review site and found it very useful not only for future cloud consumers but also for cloud hosting provider as a good way to get exposure for their services.
Extent of Geographic distribution and redundancy
Data Center location is a great question. It depends upon the vendor. Many of the mentioned providers have several data centers spread throughout the United States of America. Some like Amazon have acquired data centers in other countries to provide further global redundancy and dispersion. For Amazon's case this is not their default set up and comes with additional costs. If redundancy and geographic dispersion are important to you then data center locations can be found using techniques found in this article:http://ideasint.blogs.com/ideasinsights/2011/05/sniffing-out-the-geographic-location-of-cloud-service-data-centers-.html
Do any of the cloud hosting
Do any of the cloud hosting providers have more than one data center in
case of natural disasters? I would hate to put all of my info onto a
server somewhere and then something happens to the data center. Are
there any that have data centers in two different parts of the world for
security purposes?
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